Primo tamburo

Primo tamburo removes tradition from the distance of folklore and makes it survive as a present, precarious identity, traversed by the codes of the everyday image. In the Mata & Grifone series, begun in 2010, Zampogna does not reconstruct an original, intact South, but reactivates its ritual forms within contemporary visibility. The musician therefore functions neither as documentation of a festival nor as a figure in costume: the title identifies him through his musical role, while the work separates that role from the collective body of the band. The ritual persists, but is entrusted to an individual who seems both to represent it and to remain outside it.

The musician’s frontal isolation, sharpened by his ordinary clothes and dark glasses, turns the authority of the principal drummer into an ambiguous pose, suspended between communal belonging and self-representation. Enlarged until it bears upon the body, the instrument retains sound’s power of convocation without showing its effect on others: what should regulate collective movement becomes the mute sign of an absent community. The yellow fabric, scattered with small blue flowers, does not simply receive the figure. Its printed motif resurfaces across the face, limbs and drumhead, interrupting their continuity and subjecting man and object to the same decorative pressure. Presence thus wavers between personal image, processional apparition and memory already absorbed into the support.

Compared with the earlier contaminations between “real reality” and “media reality,” montage here does not oppose two recognisable images, but acts between body, role and pattern. The everyday does not erase myth, just as ornament does not annul ritual: both destabilise its authority and prevent tradition from closing into a pacified identity. Primo tamburo introduces a solitary pause into the visual machine of Mata and Grifone. What remains for the viewer is a figure charged with setting the tempo for others, yet fixed in a present without a procession, where cultural transmission still appears possible precisely because it is not offered as an intact image.